The present invention relates to international telecommunications systems and particularly to toll-free or "800" telecommunications networks, but which may be applied in a straightforward manner to other value-added service telephone number.
For purposes of telephone communications, a geopolitical area, such as the United States, is divided into a plurality of contiguous, non-overlapping districts, called exchanges, each of which is usually served by a local telephone company. Telephone calls originating and terminating within the same exchange, referred to as intraexchange calls, are generally handled end-to-end by a local, intraexchange, telephone company. Calls originating within one exchange, for example, in a foreign country and terminating in a different foreign country, such as the United States, referred to as interexchange calls, are generally handled at each end by the Telecommunication Administration that services the respective originating and terminating exchange.
As used herein, a "domestic" location refers to a location within the North American Numbering plan (NANP) but excluding the international Carribean and Mexico, in World Zone 1 as described in CCITT Blue Book, Vol. 2 FASCICLE II-2, Telephone Network and ISDN--Operation, Numbering, Routing and Mobile Service Recommendations E.100-E.333, at E.164 (1989) incorporated herein by reference. A "non-domestic", "foreign" or "overseas" location refers to a call originating from a location outside World Zone 1, as described in the reference above, from Mexico (which utilizes the NANP), or from the Carribean (which, although part of World Zone 1, has the attendant drawbacks of other non-domestic locations).
Callers located in the United States generally have the ability to dial certain special numbers, for example, "800" followed by 7 digits (800+7D) to call a sponsor or subscriber to an "800" service at no charge to the caller, or "900", "700" and "500" followed by 7 or more digits to access a "value-added" sponsor provided service. Additionally, the sponsors or subscribers to these services have many other features, such as receiving call origination information often called calling line indentification (CLI), or call blocking, available to them. CLI enables the sponsor or subscriber seeking additional features to obtain valuable marketing information such as: the times and dates of the calls, the origination point of the calls, the duration of the calls, etc. As a result, "800" calls are valuable marketing tools because the entire call (i.e. end-to-end) is paid for by the subscriber, the subscriber can market the number in the national media, and the subscriber can, to some extent, restrict access to its 800 number to preselected geographic regions.
Unfortunately, the domestic 800 number subscriber does not have the same abilities with respect to non-domestic originating calls. This problem arises because each non-domestic telecommunication administration has its own numbering plan which may or may not be able to accommodate direct dialing of an 800+7D domestic number. Therefore, it is currently impossible for domestic 800 service subscribers to market their 800+7D domestic number non-domestically.
Furthermore, where non-domestic telecommunication administrations have the ability to accommodate direct dialing of an 800+7D domestic number, they can not pass originating country information to the domestic telecommunication administration as part of the 800+7D domestic number. Thus, there is no way for the subscriber to know the originating location and therefore block or deny access to the non-domestic call.
Currently, calls from non-domestic callers to domestic toll-free numbers come into the domestic telecommunication administration, illustratively the AT&T Switched Network (ASN) as a network routing number (NRN) in the format 196-WXY-CCVZ or 196-WXY-VCCZ. The CC identifies the originating telecommunication administration and the WXYVZ is a subscriber identification number. Since the value of CC must be in the range of 10 to 99, the system can only accommodate 89 unique telecommunication administrations. Furthermore, certain of the 5 digits WXYVZ are restricted to a range of values less than 0 through 9 resulting in only approximately 16,900 possible subscriber identities. The number of telecommunication administrations is fast approaching the limit as are number of subscribers desireous of such services.
Thus, a need exists in the art for a new process for receiving a wider range of calls from non-domestic telecommunication administration is required which will enable the non-domestic telecommunication administration to pass toll-free telephone numbers to the domestic telecommunication administration in either the Foreign Subscriber Identifying Format of 196-TUW-XYVZ (where T,U,W,X,Y,V,Z=0-9), from locations where direct dialing of 800+7D is not possible, or directly in the preferable 800+7D format without the need for the non-domestic telecommunication administration to also send embedded country and carrier identifying coding as part of the number.